Monday, November 30, 2009

The Weekend

It was an interesting weekend.

On Saturday, I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7. I was already using 64-bit Vista, so I just upgraded instead of doing a clean install. It took about an hour, it was incredibly smooth, and I didn't have a single problem.

Way to go, Microsoft.

Here's how much I like King's Bounty: The Legend. Even after becoming a victim of the infamous Vista 64 crashes during battles, even after wasting (easily) 15 or 20 hours trying to troubleshoot the problem (which I wrote about at length earlier this year), even after having zero attention and no patches for this issue by the developers (who developed Space Rangers 2, if you remember, which was one my favorite PC games of the last decade), I was still desirous when the Armored Princess expansion came out.

It's a disease, really.

So here's the torturous logic I used to justify buying both the original game (which I've already bought) and the expansion via Steam. Wait, "logic" is too strong a word--"desperately hopeful" is more accurate. I was desperately hoping that the Steam version was magically different than the disc-based version I bought and would therefore run just fine in Windows 7. Plus, the bundle was $39, and the expansion by itself is $29 at EB Games, so I'm really only paying $10 to try this out, right?

Sure.

Like I said, it was totally ridiculous, embarrassing even as I type it up. What a tool.

Having said all that, though, it worked. Yes, incredibly, the combination of Windows 7 and the Steam version have magically fixed all the crashing problems I was having. I played at least 3-4 hours on both Saturday and Sunday with zero crashes (and spent another big chunk of time playing Solium Infernum, which made it the biggest gaming weekend I've had in a long, long time).

On Sunday morning, Eli 8.3 and I went for a ride on a new course we'd mapped out the day before. It was about 2.5 miles, and mostly consisted of curving sidewalks (and lovely scenery) along a road called Riata Trace Parkway.

One of the sections, though, was a red dirt park trail around a big pond. We hadn't walked the trail in advance, just saw via Bikely that it looped around the pond and was about half a mile in length. We both really like mixing in a little trail riding during a regular road route, so this was going to be the best part of the ride.

What we didn't know (besides accidentally taking what I now believe was a longer route that was hidden in the trees in Google Maps) was that there were rocks on this trail, and I don't mean "rocks," I mean "ROCKS." Giant rocks that a single person would never be able to lift, and lots of them jutted sharply above the ground. It would have been a nicely challenging course on a mountain bike.

Except, obviously, that we were on unicycles. Oops.

This is the kind of situation where your strongest instinct is to just plow through, and we started (very carefully) picking our way throught this mess. Incredibly, Eli 8.3 only had to dismount twice, and he planned it both times. Not so incredibly, I fell, and it was one of those falls where my whole body slammed onto the ground with no chance to use my hands to break the fall. It's one of the hardest falls I've had in a long time, and I'm sure I sounded like Matthew Stafford miked up when I hit the ground (in case you listened to that).

I went ahead and finished the ride, but man, it hurt. So today my left side basically feels like it got beaten with a sledgehammer. Of course, I'm still driving over there today and walking that section to figure out if we took a wrong turn, and to see if there's any way to ride through.

Also yesterday, my stomach decided to blow up (which seems to happen every year or so). I woke up at 5:30 with an entirely ridiculous amount of hearburn, and even after being careful with what I ate during the day, over about a ten minute period last night it become exponentially worse, so much so that I was basically inapacitated for about an hour. I was so nauseous that I was dizzy.

That means that I'll be eating very little for the next few days while my system sorts everything else out. Cookies are pretty bland, right?